I wrote a post back in August 2015 about empathy as the next great management trend, and I’m not sure that has yet to come to fruition. Maybe it was because Trump was elected 14 or so months after that, and he helped usher in (or continue, really) a very specific type of douche-y “leadership” where loyalty is demanded above all. That might not be the reason and the easier reason might just be that we’re not very good at leadership collectively, and we don’t seem to know what it means either.
Anyway, I’ve long been bullish on empathy. I would say the most research I ever put into a single blog post in the last eight years was this one on whether you can teach empathy to adults. I actually wrote that laying on the rug of the apartment my ex and I shared, and it took so long to write that I woke up and had generic rug imprinted on my shirt. Ha.
So flash forward to yesterday. I am hosting church small group and in my driveway you’ve got chalk and a bubble machine for the toddlers. Real semi-suburban shit, even though I live 3 minutes from the 12th-biggest downtown in America. One of my friends, a doctor, is talking about how the med school she teaches with has some “new commitment to empathy,” which is good, since doctors need that, no? Right. But most of their “empathy modules” are fake scenarios that the residents know are fake, so it’s all a bit of song and dance. We’re talking while her son is playing with the bubbles, and I’m thinking about this module I worked on for a bigger telecommunications company last year. The managerial class wanted “empathy training,” but really they just wanted 3-5 bullet points about the value of empathy. They were just going to show that to managers and … I don’t know what. Something would happen by osmosis?
This is a problem.
Managers are busy people — or at least think of themselves that way
And they’re often pulled in many directions, including:
- Their boss
- Spouse/partner
- Kids
- Hobbies
- Commitments and appointments
- Their direct reports
If you try to order that list in terms of who a manager responds to first, usually you end up with “direct reports” at the bottom, as I did it here. And usually the people managers would need to practice empathy with are their direct reports.
But a lot of training, especially vendor training, is basically about checking a box. “Give me three bullet points about empathy. Thank u, next.” It’s all kind of lame. Some do it right; most do not.
There’s no action items to these “empathy transformations.” You’re training doctors to be more empathetic by what, putting them in weird, fake, forced conversations? Not that helpful. Get them in front of real patients faster, with guidance and monitoring. You’re training managers to be more empathetic by completely ignoring any incentive structures and not giving them conversations, guides, sample openers, etc? Through three bullet points?
Empathy is tremendously important, and quite possibly underscores the human condition. As people come out of COVID to new realities around work and friendship and child-rearing and income, I think we could all use a bit more of it. The concern/question/problem is: short of really deep personal interaction with a friend where you get checked and garner some empathy, what else is out there that can really teach it? Most of the attempts we make seem toothless and lacking action items, and it’s even worse when #HRCathy is in the back of the room with her “fun slides” on empathy.
Takes?
See: Organisational Psychotherapy and in particular, the Antimatter Principle.